RSS feedsStanding out from the ranks if you’re a small accountancy practice is not an easy matter. It takes a consistently rigorous approach to quality of service and, if your intention is to grow in size and reputation, no small measure of ambition. Wingrave Yeats has both.
This £3.4m firm is an Accountancy Age award winner twice over. In 2000, it was named Best Small Firm of the Year and three years later, it was named Best Medium-Size Firm of the Year. In the meantime, senior partner Christopher Jenkins was named Best Business Adviser of the Year for 2001-02 in a CBI-sponsored award.
Developments at Wingrave Yeats are far from over. The partners have an ambition to become a £10m firm, and as it is adding £100,000 of new annuity business every month, this is no ‘pie-in-the-sky’ target.
The firm increased fee income by 32% for 2005-06 and expects to grow again by 38% in the current financial year, taking the firm to more than £4.7m. That’s fairly easy to achieve, says Jenkins, when you are starting from a small base.
But this is not growth for growth’s sake. Wingrave Yeats has a mixed client roster with owner-managed business appearing alongside the names of blue chip-listed companies such as Deutsche Bank and Marriott. The firm audits Cunard Seaborn, QXL and Carnival UK the UK arm of US-based Carnival Corporation. It has also developed a specialism within banking and the capital markets with clients such as Merrill Lynch, Société Générale Asset Management and JP Morgan.
Brand awareness
Jenkins, who co-founded the firm in 1984, is happy but he could be happier. He
says keeping existing clients is one thing; developing past a certain point is
quite another. You need brand awareness. ‘So, size does matter,’ according to
Jenkins.
He has great ambitions for the firm, but is relaxed about his own somewhat reluctant entry into the profession. ‘I didn’t particularly want to be an accountant, but my father suggested I should. In those days, you did what your father suggested,’ he smiles. ‘I interviewed at Deloitte Haskins & Sells and actually expressed reluctance about joining.’
After a year out in Italy, Jenkins completed his training at Deloitte and then spent two years with the firm in Paris. But he was not persuaded that big-firm life was for him and began looking for a role outside the world of practice.
After a brief but formative period advising small businesses at Deloitte in London, Jenkins became managing director of WH Everett a £10m wholesale academic bookseller with 40 staff. ‘I left the profession because I didn’t really want to carry on at Deloitte. I didn’t want to work for a big organisation. I didn’t really like the physical environment of being on the 17th floor and not being able to open a window. And I didn’t really like being bossed around either. I was ungovernable, as most people who run businesses are I think.’
Life at Everett, while providing a measure of autonomy, didn’t stretch Jenkins in the way he had hoped. ‘I found I really liked advising people. I found that commerce and this is a silly thing to say tended to be too much of a routine. I remember thinking: I’ve got the same client every day. There was something in me that wanted to be working in an advisory capacity.’
Fortunately, Jenkins had already found a like-minded potential business partner in Philip Hedges, while in Paris, where Hedges had been working for Ernst & Young. Their experiences and outlook were similar, so in 1984, Wingrave Yeats was born. The co-founders adopted family names from their wives’ grandfathers. ‘We didn’t want to have Jenkins Hedges & Co because we wanted to build something that was greater than the sum of two parts. We wanted to b u ild a brand.’
The beginnings of that brand revolved around a simple notion. ‘We just wanted to do useful things for our clients. When I got back from Paris, I had the privilege of being the first employee of a nascent small business department within Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and I really enjoyed that. I wanted to change the world and help people run their business better.’
Common sense solutions
Helping people grow their businesses and solve problems doesn’t stem from a
particular school of management consultancy and importantly goes beyond the
usual tax, accounting and compliance advice. ‘The answers are all predicated on
what is the most sensible thing to do,’ says Jenkins. ‘Most of the advice I give
is common sense. It’s based on logic and a bit of expertise.
The right thing to do is the obvious thing to do.’ Jenkins and Hedges spent the first five or six years working as two advisers with a secretary and a couple of assistants. But their thinking and therefore the firm’s brand soon started to crystallise.
‘We developed the idea of trying to provide the same kind of excellence you would find in a larger firm, but not bringing with us the things that a lot of people don’t really like about large organisations, such as hierarchy, bureaucracy for its own sake and not being capable of being fleet of foot. That is still what we feel now. We feel that one of our two unique selling points is that we bring the experience and expertise of a big firm of partners adding to that the fleet-footedness of a small practice. We don’t bump into many people who offer the same thing we do.’
The other unique selling point Wingrave Yeats offers is that several of its partners have also worked outside the profession. While in Paris, Hedges was part of the management of holding company Pricel a listed multinational. ‘We have experience in being audited,’ says Jenkins. ‘I was audited at WH Everett and I know what pain the profession can inflict on the unsuspecting client.
‘What I’m all about is giving my knowledge to the person I’m advising. We want to educate our client. They will come to us able to add up. We want to teach them long division, because if they know that they will come back to us with a more complex problem having used that knowledge to build a bigger business. And then we can teach them how to do algebraic equations and theorems. And then it becomes fun.’
While Jenkins and Hedges have developed a different culture to that of bigger firms, they admire the Big Four. With Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory pressures, big firms have to turn down work where there is a potential conflict. To reject work graciously, the Big Four need to be able to offer trusted alternatives from the ranks of smaller firms.
The firm can, and does, benefit from this kind of referral and, although the practice’s culture is different from that of a big firm, it is able to offer a level of service that blue chip companies are comfortable with. The profession, says Jenkins, is not as segmented as people think.
For a reluctant accountant, life at Wingrave Yeats provides plenty of satisfaction for Jenkins. There is the opportunity to work with large listed companies as well as businesses in the owner-manager territory.
Then there is the personal satisfaction that comes from problem solving on behalf of clients. As the number one most trusted advisers in business life, accountants in smaller firms are in a strong position to develop their businesses, provided they are prepared to punch above their weight, in terms of the level of service they offer. Above all, professional life is what you make of it.
‘When you find what you enjoy in a career, it can be surprising what you find out about yourself. I quite like writing and I never thought that being an accountant would enable me to write. ‘One of the things I love about being senior partner of this firm is that I have the great privilege we all have t he great privilege of being the architect of our social environment. Therefore, we’re working with some very nice and good people. That’s a great privilege.’
Secrets of success
• Have confidence – smaller firms don’t need to confine themselves to the
owner-managed, and small and medium-size business heartland. Providing they have
confidence in their quality of service, they can compete for blue chip business,
picking up referrals from Big Four firms;
• Have a willingness to nurture businesses – successful advisers take a mentoring and teaching role with their clients. They don’t hide behind their expertise;
• Work with people you like and trust – the great privilege of life in a small firm is becoming the architect of your own social environment;
• Solve problems – clients will stay loyal when their specific issues are addressed and taken seriously.
